Q&A: 4 Questions for Asbury Park Super Lamont Repollet

Asbury Park Superintendent Lamont Repollet discusses the upcoming school year and new programs.
Austin Bogues

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Dr. Lamont Repollet, superintendent of Asbury Park School District, talks about his vision for the 2016-2017 school year with members of his staff at the Asbury Park Board of Education building in Asbury Park, NJ Thursday August 25, 2016. The hard hat is a symbol of my vision of “Building A Brighter Future.”(Photo: Tanya Breen/staff photographer)Buy Photo

Bad news kids, homework doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon for Asbury Park. Superintendent Lamont Repollet shared his thoughts on school work, homework, help for parents and students in a recent interview with the Press.

Here's a wrap-up of some of the discussion:

1. There's been a lot of talk recently about whether homework is still necessary for students. A post went viral recently where a teacher said she would no longer assign it and instead encouraged parents to eat a meal and read with their children What do you think?

There's a national debate on homework. Some people feel homework is important, some people feel homework is just busy work. We're going to give you relevant work that's going to extend the learning outside the classroom. We believe homework should support what's going on in the classroom with our lesson objective but more importantly is it aligned with our Common Core standard.

2. What are you doing to help parents and community members get involved?

What we're doing is instilling the love of learning in our students but also more so stressing the importance of education and through that we've created a parent center. Our parent center will be offering GED courses, it will be offering a parent literacy program and it will also be offering a bilingual and language lab. Once you create literate families you're going to have literate children. Once you create the love of learning in the families you're going to have students instill the love of learning.

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Lamont Repollet, superintendent of Asbury Park School District, listens to Marckenley St. Surin, 12, talk about a computer lesson in his ESL class at Asbury Park Middle School in Asbury Park, NJ Monday November 30, 2015(Photo: Tanya Breen/staff photographer)

3. How do you get kids acquainted with new technology like iPads interested in reading and learning?

We understand our students enter our school as digital natives. We also understand that we are digital immigrants. Their capacity to work within the realm of video and gaming is seamless to them. it's what they do. For us it's a challenge, it's a new skill that we have to learn. We wanted to go to a plan that has blended learning. We're giving them traditional learning, and also what we think is 21st-century learning. We have enough devices in our district to outfit every kid. We are moving toward looking going 1 to 1. We're creating a strategic technology plan to match our academics, we want to make sure the technology we have in place supports the programs we're introducing.

4. Gov. Christie has proposed a funding proposal that would slash money from Asbury Park. Do you think that is a fair funding proposal?

I'm not going to get back and forth with the politicians in calling the name, whether it's fair funding , whether's it's no funding whether it's some funding that's not really our place. I'm an educator, we are not for profit that means that we get our funding from the government, whether it's the state, the local, or whether it's the federal (government). We're going to continue to educate our kids with whatever funding we get every year from the state.